In his poem, Going for Water, Robert Frost relates how the discovery that "The well was dry beside the door" leads him and another into the woods, on a moonlit autumn evening, to see if the brook was also dry. Getting closer there is a sense of anxiety as "Each laid on other a staying hand / To listen ere we dared to look". What if the brook was dry, too? What might that mean, going forwards?
In your life, are there not also times when the well by the door - the nearest supply of all that is essential - seems to have dried completely? Just the bare echo from an empty well. Supplies of sustaining water that you have come to depend upon, perhaps over many years, are now cracked and withered, coarsened by drought.
Jeremiah spoke the Lord's word to the people of his day, who had wilfully turned their backs on "the spring of living water" (Jer. 2:13). They had forsaken the Lord and had instead dug their own cisterns, their own means of security and joy. But they were incapable of holding water. It was a hopeless sight, yet the people clung stubbornly to their faded dreams.
Our days of drought might be the consequence of our own choices. We retain a capacity for folly that is damaging to our souls and to the life of the church. If the Lord humbles us over it, that is a gift we need to receive.
But there are also arid seasons that are not the fruit of our flawed choices and tainted loves. Simply living in this world and experiencing "the sufferings of this present age" is enough to bleed dry our hoarded hopes.
The two in Frost's poem make a discovery. In the hush, "We heard, we knew we heard the brook". The anxiety was past, dispelled by "A note as from a single place, / A slender tinkling fall". There is water in the brook, and the water there has a dual quality: it makes "drops that floated on the pool / Like pearls" and "now a silver blade".
Lustrous, pearly drops and a blade's sharpness and strength. Water that is precious and strong, that hasn't dried-up when other sources have. What was this brook for Frost? Love in all its colours? Beauty in all its hues? It's hard to say. What we do know is that our Lord Jesus speaks to us, in tones crystal clear, of living water, the very life of God, in all its purity and strength.
His voice is the "note as from a single place" that our hearts are so desperate to hear. His word is the declaration that slakes our thirst for mercy and grace, for renewal and peace.
Our own cisterns - our grasp at a self-determined existence and self-sustaining joy - are beyond repair and never could hold anything for very long. They ought to remain buried in our history. But the love of Jesus and the living word of Jesus - they sustain, through trials and temptations, in seasons of suffering and ache.
Our privilege, each day, is to go for water, to the wells of salvation that will never run dry.
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I hunger and I thirst;
Jesus, my manna be;
Ye living waters, burst
Out of the rock for me.
Thou bruised and broken Bread,
My life-long wants supply;
As living souls are fed,
O feed me, or I die.
Thou true life-giving Vine,
Let me Thy sweetness prove;
Renew my life with Thine,
Refresh my soul with love.
Rough paths my feet have trod,
Since first their course began;
Feed me, Thou Bread of God;
Help me, thou Son of Man.
For still the desert lies
My thirsting soul before:
O living waters, rise
Within me evermore.
(John Samuel Bewley Monsell, 1811-75)
